Event Description
Join the Arts Research Center for our first Poetry & the Senses reading of fall 2023, featuring the incredible poets and multimedia artists J. Michael Martin and aracelis girmay. Following their readings, they will be in conversation with Prof John Alba Cutler (English).
Speakers
J. Michael Martinez is a multimedia artist and the author of three collections of poetry, including Heredities, which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Museum of the Americas, which was a winner of the National Poetry Series Competition and long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry. He is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University.
aracelis girmay makes poems, multigenre texts, picture books, and collages. In collaboration with artist Valentina Améstica and the Center for Book Arts, a limited edition chapbook of her new work will be out later in the fall. She is the editor of So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket, 2023) and is the editor-at-large of the Blessing the Boats Selections. She is also on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund. For her work girmay was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She will begin teaching at Stanford University in fall 2023.
John Alba Cutler researches in the fields of Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x literature and culture; his teaching comprises courses in these fields as well as in modern and contemporary American literature. His book Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford, 2015) argues that Chicano/a/x literature provides a powerful counter-discourse to sociological accounts of assimilation in the post-WWII era. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume from Cambridge in the series Latinx Literature in Transition, has published articles on Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x literature and culture in American Literary History, English Language Notes, and Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and contributed chapters to the Cambridge Companionto Transnational American Literature, American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement.
Cosponsors
Hosted by the Arts Research Center and co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Department of English at UC Berkeley, and Engaging the Senses Foundation.